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The Farthest Shore : Composition

The Farthest Shore, is an oratorio based on an extraordinary Celtic tale inspired by the folklore and documented history of the Isle of Anglesey, spiritual home to the last of the Druids and the Avalon of Arthurian legend.

Developing techniques I began in Seventy Four Degrees North and explored further in Spectred Light, The Farthest Shore attempts to translate the physical energy of my opera to a concert-hall situation. A number of theatrical and spatial devices are employed here to aid this, including using the choir as an electroacoustic surround-sound, commenting gesturally upon the melodic material sung by the soloists and, making the choir and soloists move around and in-between the audience – sometimes with the audience themselves participating – to create an aural soundscape that is constantly shifting both harmonically and, often, literally mirroring the psychological aspects of the folktale.

Structurally, the score is, like my opera, constructed using Fibonacci numbers to decide musical climaxes, harmonic changes and dramatic moments. The music itself is represented more as gesture and sound at the beginning of the piece – defined more by horizontal line, rather than vertical harmony, gradually becoming clearer as the narrator reveals more of his past life to the audience. As vertical harmony reveals itself more and more, rhythm becomes more and more gestural until in the third movement, a statistic harmony is married to a frenetic rhythm. The fourth movement is a distillation of the harmonic material of the entire piece, as the true nature of the narrator is revealed, and the piece ends in quiet resolution, as a duet between the two halves of the narrator’s true self.